Moral Theology

I had lunch with Father Thomas Weinandy this past Saturday; he is a Capuchin, the former Warden of Greyfriars s in Oxford and the former doctrinal consultant to the USCCB. He and a group of other theologians published a critique of Amoris Laetitia, and he reiterated his unhappiness with the ambiguity of the document, which seems to allow access to the sacraments to the divorced and remarried, even if they continue to have intercourse. The document is ambiguous, but Pope Francis in a private letter to the Argentine bishops said that indeed that was a valid interpretation.

Weinandy said that intercourse in such circumstances was adultery, forbidden by the Commandments and reinforced by Jesus when he forbade divorce and remarriage. Francis seems to follow those theologians who see obedience to the commandments, at least in sexual matters, as an ideal; but the commandment that forbids adultery is not an ideal, but a command. It is not optional. Obedience to the commandments is required to be in a state of grace and to receive the sacraments.

But I think that Pope Francis, in his work in the barrios of Buenos Aires, frequently encountered situations like these:

A man and a woman living in a stable relationship with children.

A man and a woman living in a civil marriage with children.

A man and a women, one or both of whom had been in a sacramental marriage, living in a stable relationship or civil marriage with children.

What might well happen is that one partner, and I suspect almost always the woman, would have pangs of conscience about their relationship and seek counsel in confession.

The man might not even be a Christian, and even if Catholic might well be, like many Hispanics, anticlerical.

In case one or two, the man might refuse to have the church witness the marriage.

In case three he might well refuse to cease intercourse.

If the woman denies him intercourse, he might well abandon the family, leaving the children without a father and without provision.

The woman is willing to enter into a sacramental marriage (case 1 and 2) or to cease intercourse (case 3), but cannot get her partner to agree.

What is a priest to do? If he insists that the woman deny her partner intercourse before she can receive the sacraments, he might well break up a stable union and the children would suffer, perhaps severely.

In case one and two, she is committing fornication every time she has intercourse; in case three she is committing adultery.

Father Weinandy said these are hard cases, but I suspect they are not at all uncommon, especially among the poor of South America.

Should a priest deny access to the sacraments to the woman? She wants to obey the commandments.

My wife and I have been watching British mysteries; a constant theme is that when the guilty are caught and punished, the innocent suffer as well. Who wants to tell a wife and children that the man in the house is a pedophile or a murderer?

Sometimes there is no way to avoid hurting the innocent. But even detectives, and even more so priests, seek way to avoid hurting children.

I think this is what Francis has encountered. Those who take the strictest line say, Fiat iustitia, ruat caelum; but if at all possible mercy and compassion should be shown to the innocent, the children whose lives would be disrupted at best and perhaps ruined if the priest insists on the strictest obedience to the commandments.

It is hard to justify theologically allowing the woman to receive the sacraments, and Francis made no attempt to do so. It is somewhat like the conundrums surrounding lying. Augustine and Aquinas said that is never under any circumstance allowed to tell a lie – it is an exceptionless norm. But what were the Jesuits to do who had to take on false identities to minister during the English Mission? Or resistance fighters who were protecting Jews from the Nazis?

Can an exceptionless norm have exceptions? Or is willingness to obey the equivalent to obedience to the norm, even if obedience is impossible without injuring the innocent? I don’t know.

Although we are usually not aware of it, our moral attitudes have been shaped by centuries of philosophical and theological controversies. The ones that have shaped the modern world, and almost always for the worse, are nominalism and voluntarism. They are the wrong or at least inadequate answers to important questions: “Does reality have a logical, comprehensible structure, or is everything dependent solely on will, whether the will of God or the will of man?” The wrong answers to these questions continue to distort both secular culture and the culture of the Church. The distortions are perhaps most severe, or perhaps at least most visible, in sexual matters, such as the question of gender identity or marriage and divorce.

Dominicans in particular have seen in nominalism and voluntarism the source of severe distortions in Christian moral attitudes.[i] Both sides in the current controversy in the Catholic Church over the admission of divorced and remarried persons to the sacraments claim the other side suffers from these distortions.

To begin with the beginning.

The Greeks had confidence that the universe had a rational structure, a logical structure, and that beyond the seeming disorder there was a logos which was at least partially accessible to human reason. The Wisdom literature of the Old Testament was influenced by this, and Christians believe that in Jesus the Word, the Logos, has become flesh and dwelt among us.

Greek philosophy and its heirs believed in the ability of reason to comprehend reality. Philosophers were realists; they believed that our ideas, our concepts, our categories correspond to something that exists out there, outside of our minds. We can form true ideas that correspond to the essences or natures of things.

Plato took this to an extreme with his doctrine of Ideas that have an eternal, independent existence. Aristotle and Aquinas thought that the underlying essences or natures did not exist independently, but nonetheless had a real existence in, not apart from, the individuals in that category. That is, there is no independent eternal idea of DOG, but there is a species of dog and this species is not simply a construct of the human mind but corresponds to something, a nature, an essence, outside our minds.

But for nominalists, only particulars exist. Our general ideas, our categories, our concepts are more or less arbitrary, mere names we apply to groups of particulars. Our ideas do not correspond to anything outside of us; they exist only in our minds. There are no natures or essences. There are only mental categories into which we place particular beings. There is no human nature, only particular human beings. Therefore there cannot be a natural law based on the essence or nature of something, since natures do not exist.

We decide which individuals we will put into a category; we do not discover the reality that unites and underlies a group of particular beings. Our ideas are only names, nomina in Latin; they are based on an act of our will, voluntas, not on an act of reason.

William of Occam is the philosopher most associated with nominalism, and from nominalism he deduced another type of voluntarism. If reality has no logical structure; it is governed solely by acts of the divine will, voluntas. For Ockham, God’s omnipotence dominated to the extent that God’s freedom had to be so absolute that it could not be limited by reason, by nature, by truth, by anything he had done in the past or promised for the future. God was free to be arbitrary, to change at any time, to change the laws of human nature (which is after all only a human category). God’s freedom was undetermined by anything. Omnipotence was the first and most important attribute of God; he could do anything; he was not subject to any higher law, including, some said, the laws of logic, even the law of contradiction.

Since reality does not have a logical structure, morality is based solely on the will of God. The voluntarists taught that God could command us to kill, steal, commit adultery, and we would be obliged to do so; some even taught that God could command us to hate Him, and we would be obliged to hate Him.

Because the omnipotence of God had already become prominent in medieval philosophy, the sovereignty of God was a leading doctrine of the Reformation. Luther said that “God is He for whose will no cause or ground may be laid down as its rule and standard…What God wills is not right because He ought or was bound so to will, what takes place must be right, because He so wills.” Calvin concurred; “God’s will is so much the highest rule of righteousness that whatever He wills, by the very fact the He wills it, must be considered righteous.”

Submission in Arabic is Islam; and both nominalism and voluntarism entered Western philosophy at the time when Western Christendom was beginning to interact with the Islamic world.

Pope Benedict in his Regensburg address considered the analogues of Western nominalism and voluntarism in Islam and described the consequences of this voluntarism:

“This … might even lead to the image of a capricious God, who is not even bound to truth and goodness. God’s transcendence and otherness are so exalted that our reason, our sense of the true and good, are no longer an authentic mirror of God.”

Benedict sees this as a false idea of transcendence. On the contrary, Benedict insisted,

“God does not become more divine when we push him away from us in a sheer, impenetrable voluntarism; rather, the truly divine God is the God who has revealed himself as logos and, as logos, has acted and continues to act lovingly on our behalf. “

Love transcends reason but it “continues to be love of the God who is Logos. Consequently, Christian worship is “λογικη λατρεία” [rational adoration], worship in harmony with the eternal Word and with our reason.”

Before I turn to how Catholicism has been affected by voluntarism, let us briefly look at how our culture has been influenced by nominalism. Pope Francis at the United Nations criticized “declarationist nominalism,”[ii] and I think this is what he meant: Today a person is a male; tomorrow he decides he is a female; and his reality is determined by an act of will, not an exercise of reason. A family is anything we decide it is and declare it to be; marriage is whatever we say it is. We do not perceive reality; we create it by an act of will. An article I read, I think in the NYT, explained why reporters used the term fetus when talking about abortion but the term unborn child when referring to a miscarriage. The article explained that the parents decided whether the thing in the womb was a fetus which could be cut up and sold or an unborn child to be loved. Will has triumphed over reason.

Roman Catholic theology never went to the extremes that the Reformation did in emphasizing the omnipotence of God, but among the Jesuits moral theology tended to focus on the will rather than on the reason as the locus of morality. The Jesuits were interested mainly in the interaction of God’s will and the human will. This variety of voluntarism stressed that the main content of morality is obedience to commandments, rules, laws, coming from an authority, a will, outside of oneself.

Germain Grisez[iii] describes the attitude toward the moral law that this produced:

“By keeping these rules one would merit heaven; by violating them one would deserve eternal punishment in hell. In this perspective, an understanding of the intrinsic connection between Christian life in this world and eternal life was far less important than a firm conviction that the disobedience of mortal sin must be avoided.”

This focus on law and obligation as the norm of moral actions created a legalistic mentality.

Grisez continues: “Legalism often causes the faithful to view the Church’s moral teaching as an imposition. The suspicion grows that the Christian life itself is a kind of arbitrary test for which different rules could well be devised if only the test maker chose. In these circumstances, the desire increases to do as one pleases as much as one can.”

Catholics therefore tend to see morality in terms of things that are forbidden, and even worse, tend to think that things are wrong only because God or the Church forbids them, not that God or the Church forbids them because they are wrong and destructive. And many Catholics tend to think that God and the church can change these rules and are simply mean not to do so. The moral life becomes a contest between the human will and the divine will, in which the human will pursues its own ends and tries to carve out a space for itself by obeying only those divine commands it has to obey to avoid damnation.

The voluntarist view of morality focuses on the obligation imposed by the authority of the divine will when it promulgates a law. The main point of the moral life is to avoid guilt which is a deliberate and conscious transgression of a known commandment.

The person who sees everything only in terms of obligation has a strong tendency to be a minimalist. How late can I arrive to mass, how early can I leave and still fulfill the Sunday obligation? How much am I obliged to give to support the Church? How much can I eat and not break the Lenten fast? And, the main concern of young males, how far can I go and not commit a mortal sin?

This is not a good attitude for a Christian. It becomes even more destructive when casuists minimize the obligations. Pascal in the Provincial Letters lambasts the Jesuits for their casuistry, for the mental contortions they went through to justify acts, such as dueling, that were clearly immoral. However, he acknowledged that the Jesuits had a defensible motive: they did not want by moral rigorism to drive people out of the church; they preferred to have someone remain in the church and be a bad Catholic rather than leave the church. They knew that some men would insist on dueling and would abandon Christianity if they were told they could not duel.

Pope Francis has ignited with his Apostolic Exhortation Amoris Laetitia a controversy over the admission to communion of divorced and remarried Catholics. Each side claims the other side suffers from the distortions of post-Tridentine moral theology, which emphasized keeping rules rather than growing in virtue.

Francis criticizes what he sees as a legalistic voluntarism, a stress that the will of God must be obeyed because it is the law. His critics on the contrary see in Amoris laetitia an opening to antinomian voluntarism, that is, an implication that divine laws can be changed, and that the pope has the authority to change them. Archbishop Scicluna of Malta said, “Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the Pope, this Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present Pope.”[iv] —An odd statement that seems to claim the pope is an oracle, like the head of the Mormon church, who can have new revelations.

Some cardinals and bishops, including our Bishop Lopes,[v] reason in this way:

Divorce does not dissolve a sacramental marriage. The marriage is real; it exists until death. A person who divorces his spouse and tries to enter into another marriage is in fact committing adultery every time he has intercourse. Adultery is always a mortal sin. A person in a state of mortal sin cannot receive communion, because his relationship with God is sundered. Therefore, a person who has tried to enter into a second marriage cannot receive communion unless he abstains from sexual intercourse. This is simply the reality of the situation.

The Jesuit Antonio Spadaro, a confident of Pope Francis, responded to this reasoning in a tweet: “Theology is not #Mathematics. 2 + 2 in #Theology can make 5. Because it has to do with #God and real #life of #people…”

This remark was a red flag to critics of the lenient interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, because it looks like Spadaro claims that God is not bound by logic, that He can make 2 plus 2 to equal 5 by an act of His will. This means that reality does not have a logical structure and morality is determined purely by God’s will. Spadaro would almost certainly reject this idea, but he has not explained what he really meant.

Of course, ignorance has long been recognized as mitigating or removing the guilt of breaking a law. Ignorance can be the result of a mental blindness, not simply a result of lack of information. Some divorced and remarried cannot see or accept that their second marriage is invalid and their relations are adulterous. Such people may be without subjective guilt. They want to grow in virtue, to participate in the life of the Church, and to raise their children in the Faith. That is why they desire to receive the sacraments. Amoris Laetitia seems to open the sacraments to such people, and this is in fact how Cardinal Schönborn[vi] and many bishops have interpreted what Pope Francis wrote.

But it seems to me that this approach misses an important point. An erring conscience may absolve a person from guilt, but it does not prevent harm to God’s creation. Even if those who have attempted remarriage are without subjective guilt, their wrong actions are still destructive and harm reality. A sacramental marriage by its indissolubility is not simply a sign but a sacrament of the unbreakable love of God for the Church. That is, a sacramental marriage gives an unshakeable foundation to the family and is a mighty aid for the provision and protection of children, who are the main sufferers from the acceptance of divorce and remarriage and the atmosphere of instability it creates. An erroneous conscience may absolve a person from guilt, but it does not prevent him from hurting others.

Cardinal Ratzinger in one of his interviews recounts a conversation with an unnamed German theologian (I presume it was Hans Kung). The other theologian said it was good that the people of Europe were invincibly ignorant about sexual morality. They were going to fornicate anyway, so at least they were doing it without guilt, because they were not violating their consciences. Ratzinger asked if the Nazi SS men who killed Jews because they thought it was the right thing to do were also without guilt, because they were also following their consciences. The other theologian said yes, the Nazis who were following their conscience and killing Jews were without guilt. Ratzinger sensed there had to be something wrong with this analysis of the erroneous conscience.

The law is given as light to our eyes and a lamp to our feet. It is not good to be ignorant of it. It is not a set of more or less arbitrary rules; it is a guide to reality. It is not being merciful to people to let them live undisturbed in a false world of their own creation instead of the real world that God has created.

Seeing the moral life as only obedience to rules is inadequate, but obedience to the rules is a necessary step for moral and spiritual progress, because those rules are a guide to reality. Moral theologians who tried to get away from a purely rule-based morality and who tried to develop a morality of virtue whose aim is happiness never denied the validity of the rules. The commandments are the lowest rung of the Christian life; the Beatitudes and the infused gifts of the Holy Spirit are the higher rungs. But we can’t get to the higher rungs unless we climb the lower ones first. It’s only logical.

Pope Francis has a taste for chaos, a “mess” as he calls it[vii]; he is, after all, an Argentine. Not everyone enjoys or profits from confusion. As Cardinal Müller, the head of the CDF, said in an interview, “The task of priests and bishops is not that of creating confusion, but of bringing clarity.” Clarity is important because we should feel that moral demands are based on reason’s accurate perception of reality, not on the whim of God or of a pope.

Pope Francis has refused to answer questions that a group of cardinals put to him. The church is often reluctant to resolve a controversy prematurely, until issues are clarified. In the 17th century Dominicans and Jesuits argued violently about the nature of grace and human cooperation in grace. The Jesuits accused the Dominicans of being Calvinists, and the Dominicans accused the Jesuits of being Pelagians. This controversy was given the name De Auxiliis. The pope intervened; he forbade anyone from calling an opponent a heretic and said that the church would resolve the controversy at an opportune time.[viii] We are still waiting.

Perhaps Pope Francis is following this policy.[ix] But eventually the Church will have to arrive at some clarity and agreement about remarriage after divorce. Morality can’t differ from one diocese to the next. And do the irregular unions that Francis seems to tolerate include polygamous marriage? African bishops have a real problem with people in polygamous marriages who convert to Christianity.

But to return to our own lives and the basis for the repentance that Lent calls us to. We should always strive to be conscious that God’s commands are not arbitrary, but are based upon reality, and that He desires our happiness. Most of the time we can see this, but we all suffer from blindness about particular faults – if you are married your spouse will inform you of them. Sometimes we can’t see why God has commanded or forbidden something, but we have to trust that He can see things more accurately than we can. We should strive to understand His point of view and make it our own, through the study of Scripture and of the teachings of the Church, and through conversation with Him in prayer. His ways are the ways to true happiness, and will fulfill our deepest desires.

[ii] “Our world demands of all government leaders a will which is effective, practical and constant, concrete steps and immediate measures for preserving and improving the natural environment and thus putting an end as quickly as possible to the phenomenon of social and economic exclusion, with its baneful consequences: human trafficking, the marketing of human organs and tissues, the sexual exploitation of boys and girls, slave labour, including prostitution, the drug and weapons trade, terrorism and international organized crime. Such is the magnitude of these situations and their toll in innocent lives, that we must avoid every temptation to fall into a declarationist nominalism which would assuage our consciences. We need to ensure that our institutions are truly effective in the struggle against all these scourges.”

[iv] The bishops of Malta are merely following the directives of Pope Francis in their interpretation of Amoris Laetitia, Archbishop Charles Scicluna said in a radio interview.

Archbishop Scicluna said that the Maltese bishops’ guidelines on implementation of the papal document follow the Pope’s clear indications. He admitted that he was surprised when the Pontiff, in a letter to bishops in Buenos Aires, said that “there are no other interpretations.” However, the Maltese prelate said, “one has to accept the interpretation that the Pope gives of his own document.”

In a recent homily, speaking on the same subject, Archbishop Scicluna stressed the importance of following the pastoral guidance of the Roman Pontiff: “Whoever wishes to discover what Jesus wants from him, he must ask the Pope—this Pope, not the one who came before him, or the one who came before that. This present Pope.”

[v] Bishop Steven J. Lopes of the Personal Ordinariate of the Chair of St. Peter (the U.S.-based structure for former Anglican communities who have joined the Catholic Church) has also written that the Church’s traditional teaching on marriage has not been changed, and that couples who are remarried without an annulment cannot receive absolution or the Eucharist without the intent to refrain from sexual relations.

“Pastoral discernment admits of no exceptions to the moral law, nor does it replace moral law with the private judgements of conscience,” Bishop Lopes wrote.

[vi] Cardinal Schonborn: The complexity of family situations, which goes far beyond what was customary in our Western societies even a few decades ago, has made it necessary to look in a more nuanced way at the complexity of these situations. To a greater degree than in the past, the objective situation of a person does not tell us everything about that person in relation to God and in relation to the church. This evolution compels us urgently to rethink what we meant when we spoke of objective situations of sin. And this implicitly entails a homogeneous evolution in the understanding and in the expression of the doctrine.

Francis has taken an important step by obliging us to clarify something that had remained implicit in “Familiaris consortio” [St. John Paul II’s 1981 exhortation on the family] about the link between the objectivity of a situation of sin and the life of grace in relation to God and to his church, and –- as a logical consequence –- about the concrete imputability of sin. Cardinal Ratzinger had explained in the 1990s that we no longer speak automatically of a situation of mortal sin in the case of new marital unions. I remember asking Cardinal Ratzinger in 1994, when the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith had published its document about divorced and remarried persons: “Is it possible that the old praxis that was taken for granted, and that I knew before the [Second Vatican] Council, is still valid? This envisaged the possibility, in the internal forum with one’s confessor, of receiving the sacraments, provided that no scandal was given.” His reply was very clear, just like what Pope Francis affirms: There is no general norm that can cover all the particular cases. The general norm is very clear; and it is equally clear that it cannot cover all the cases exhaustively.

[vii] “They wrote a speech for me to give you. But speeches are boring,” the Argentine pontiff said to loud cheers, casting aside his script. “Make a mess, but then also help to tidy it up. A mess which gives us a free heart, a mess which gives us solidarity, a mess which gives us hope.”

[viii] Pope Clement XII, on October 2, 1733, issued the papal bull Apostolicae Providentiae Officio, in which he declared, “We forbid these opposing schools either in writing, or speaking or disputation or on any other occasion to dare impose any theological note or censure on the opposite school of thought or to attack their rivals in offensive or insulting language.”

[ix] Jesuit Father James Bretzke, a moral theologian at Boston College, noted that Pope Francis’ reluctance to further clarify the document and its application is intentional.

“Pope Francis is well aware of what’s going on, but I think he believes, methodologically as a way of governance, that these sorts of issues are best interpreted at the ground level,” Father Bretzke said. “He has by and large avoided the temptation to come down on high and cut off discussion or responses at lower levels, and not just in this area, but many others as well. This is the principle of subsidiarity in practice.”

As to how long the debate continues, and if it eventually works itself out, as Keating suggested, or remains a controversy for the next pope to address, are questions for the future. What the experts agree on is for the faithful to remain hopeful and to pray for the Church. (Our Sunday Visitor)

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Patrick Parkinson AM, Professor of Law, University of Sydney recently gave a lecture, CHILD SEXUAL ABUSE AND THE CHURCHES: A story of moral failure? He stresses that his observations are based upon incomplete data, but that he has observed and fought sexual abuse for many years. he is an evangelical who once studied in Czechoslovakia where be observed the brutal repression of the Catholic Church and admired the courage of Catholics. He says “I regard myself as a friend of the Catholic Church” and wants it to overcome this corruption.

From the evidence he has examined it appears to him that sexual abuse is more prevalent among Catholic clergy than among the clerical and lay workers of other denominations and among the general male population:

Prof. Des Cahill identified 378 priests who graduated from a particular seminary in Melbourne and who were ordained between 1940 and 1966. Of these, 14 (3.7%) were convicted of sex offences against children and, after their deaths, another four were acknowledged to have abused children. That is, 18 priests or 4.8% of the total who were ordained between those years, sexually abused children. Taking a later cohort of seminarians, the 74 priests who were ordained between 1968 and 1971 from that seminary, 4 (5.4%) had been convicted of sex offences against children.

In fact, I think it is higher. In the United States I think that between 7% and 10% of Catholic clergy have been sexually involved with minors. But even the lower percentages that Parkinson cites are alarming. Parkinson asks

Is this level of offending higher than for men in the general population? There is no reliable baseline data on levels of offending in the general population in Australia. Peter Marshall’s study in England found some indication of population-wide conviction rates (Marshall, 1997). One in 150 men over the age of 20 had a conviction for sexual offence against a minor. Lifetime propensity figures will of course be higher than those derived from a snapshot of the adult male population at a given moment in time. Based on his data of various cohorts of these men, Marshall estimates that between 1% and 2% of the male population would be expected to be convicted for some form of sexual offence over their lifetime (including sex offences against adults). If those figures are similar for Australia, then Prof. Cahill’s research would indicate that the rate of convictions for Catholic priests who studied at the seminary in Melbourne is much higher than in the general population (3.7% of those ordained between 1940 and 1966 and 5.4% of those ordained between 1968 and 1971).

How do Catholic clergy compare to church workers in other denominations? Parkinson notes that

The figure for the number of victims in the Catholic Church was exactly 10 times that in the Anglican Church. This is only partially explained by the greater size of the Catholic Church in Melbourne. The Catholic Archdiocese of Melbourne lists 287 parishes on its website. The Anglican Diocese of Melbourne contains 203 parishes covering greater Melbourne and Geelong (Anglican Diocese of Victoria, 2012). That is, the Anglican Church is about 70% of the size of the Catholic Church in the two Archdioceses as counted by number of parishes. In addition to parish ministries, the Catholic Church also ran schools and children’s homes in which priests and brothers worked, and this would add significantly to the tally of sexual abuse incidents which might involve members of religious organisations. There is not the same tradition in Protestant denominations of clergy or other people called to religious vocations running schools and children’s homes. Such institutions tend to be run by lay people. For these reasons, Catholic priests and religious have had a much greater opportunity for abuse than their counterparts in other denominations.

On the other hand, Anglican churches, like other Protestant churches, would also have many paid youth workers. When all explanations have been offered, the rate of convictions of Catholic Church personnel does seem to be strikingly out of proportion with the size of this faith community compared with other faith communities.

The profile of the victims of abuse also differed from those in the general population. In Australia, about 27% of girls and 9% of boys have been sexually abused. But both the Catholic and Anglican Churches vary from this pattern.

The John Jay College study of child sexual abuse in the US Catholic Church found that 81% of the victims of abuse were male. This is the opposite of patterns seen in the general population, where approximately three times as many females are abused as males.

Lest it be thought that these patterns are unique to the Catholic Church, we found a similar pattern in our Anglican Church study. Three-quarters of complainants who alleged sexual abuse were male.

Parkinson thinks that the difference is caused by the greater access to boys that clergy have:

The greater abuse of boys than girls in both the US Catholic Church and the Anglican Church of Australia is likely to reflect the fact that priests, ministers and youth leaders have a much greater opportunity to abuse boys than girls, given the patterns of their ministry. In the past, at least, it has been more common for priests and religious to be alone with adolescent boys or to have the opportunity to form unsupervised friendships with them, than with girls. Parents were likely to be concerned by too close a friendship between a 30-40 year old man and a teenage girl; but they would have had no such concerns if the priest took an interest in their troubled teenage son.

Little of the abuse by clergy has been true pedophilia. Most of the victims are adolescents:

No doubt some offending priests and members of religious orders have been paedophiles; but this is likely to explain only a proportion of sex offending against children by priests and religious. The loneliness and difficulty of a celibate life with all the demands of the priesthood may lead other men to seek out teenagers to meet their needs without them being paedophiles. Indeed, sexual attraction to post-pubescent teenagers may be, biologically-speaking, within the boundaries of normal adult sexuality.

If adults are sexually attracted to adolescents, male or female, why do the Catholic clergy succumb to this temptation more than other clergy and the general male population do?

One of the unanswered questions about sex offending by clergy is how much of it is situational, or influenced by the culture of a group, rather than the outworking of an abnormal sexual deviation.

And that is where the Catholic Church may have a unique problem.

Some priest-offenders rationalise their abusive behaviour on the basis that sexual activity with boys is not a breach of their vow of celibacy whereas sexual relations with a woman would be. Different levels of sexual contact falling short of intercourse may also be excused in this way. Some support for this thesis emerges from the survey conducted as part of the research for Towards Understanding, the discussion paper on sexual abuse in the Roman Catholic Church in Australia. Respondents noted that offenders within the Church dissociated their abusive behaviour from their commitment to celibacy. Indeed, a high number of respondents described offenders they knew as having a strong commitment to celibacy (Towards Understanding, 1999, p. 44).

This cognitive distortion may well be an important factor in sex offending against boys. If priest offenders have a strong commitment to celibacy, then sexual relations with adult women or girls will not be permissible. If these men rationalise sexual contact with men or teenage boys as either not being a breach of their vow of celibacy at all, or a sexual peccadillo which may be both tolerated within the Church and forgiven by God, then they may well be as prone to situational same-sex activity as men in prison or in other confined, all-male environments. Teenage boys in children’s homes and boarding schools, and boys in parish contexts with whom the priest or religious may find good enough reason to be alone, may disproportionately become victims because of their accessibility and vulnerability, not necessarily because of a paraphilic sexual attraction to boys of that age.

What this means is that it is impossible to end abuse by screening out men with abnormal sexual desires, because their abuse is not caused by abnormal sexual desires.

I would add that a flattening down of sexual sins is part of the problem. Traditionally, theologians have taught that there is no light matter involving sexuality. Therefore any sexual sin, a voluntary fantasy, masturbation, fornication, adultery, and child abuse, are all mortal sins that lead to damnation. Although it was not taught tat they were all equally serious, the differences among them were less important than the fact that they were all mortal sins. But they could all be forgiven by going to confession and saying a few prayers.

Clericalism has long afflicted the Catholic Church and is deeply ingrained in canon law.

There has long been a culture within international Catholicism that in some way the Church is its own jurisdiction, its own legal system, and that the proper place for judging clergy is within the structures established by Canon Law. Canon Law provides that clergy or religious who abuse children under 18 are to be “punished with just penalties, not excluding dismissal from the clerical state” (Canon 1395(2)). However, it is no part of canonical thinking that child sexual abuse is a crime that ought routinely to be reported to the police and dealt with by the criminal courts.

Priest thought they were beyond the reach of the police and the courts.

Another was the culture of clericalism. The 2011 document puts it succinctly: “The bishop has a duty to treat all priests as father and brother” (Congregatio Pro Doctrina Fidei, 2011).

That was interpreted, in some quarters, as involving an obligation to protect priests and religious brothers from the criminal law. In 2001, Bishop Pierre Pican of Bayeux was given a three-month suspended prison sentence for not reporting Fr René Bissey, who had been sentenced to 18 years in prison in 2000 for sex offences against children. It appears that the bishop indicated at his trial that the admission of guilt by the priest had not been in the confessional. Cardinal Castrillón Hoyos, the Prefect of the Congregation for the Clergy, wrote to the Bishop, congratulating him on not denouncing a priest to the civil authorities. He was said to have acted wisely in preferring to go to prison rather than denounce his priest-son. Cardinal Hoyos advanced a theological reason for this position. He explained that the relationship between priests and their bishop is not professional but sacramental and forges very special bonds of spiritual paternity. He drew the analogy with rules of law in various countries which excused one close relative from testifying against another.

The letter concluded that in order to ‘encourage brothers in the episcopate in this delicate matter’, a copy of the letter would be forwarded to all the conferences of bishops. The Cardinal said at a conference in 2010 that he wrote the letter after consulting Pope John Paul II, and that it was the Pope who authorised him to send this letter to all the bishops.

Pope Francis plans to canonize John Paul in the spring of 2014 – will Francis follow the example of his sainted predecessor in the way he handled sexual abuse?

Parkinson also notes the chaotic structure of the Catholic Church as a source of the failure to deal with abuse:

People think of it as a highly structured and hierarchical institution; but actually the opposite is the case. Each bishop is the prime authority in his diocese, subject to oversight from Rome. Each leader of a religious Order is responsible for his or her members subject to direction from the worldwide leadership of the Order, if there is one.

The management structure made sense in the Middle Ages, when the fastest mode of transport was a horse and authority even within countries, was highly decentralised. All that has changed now. To address these issues in future, the Church needs to find a way of throwing out its rotten apples, publicly rebuking or removing leaders from their positions if they have failed egregiously to do the right thing. It needs, in other words, to modernise and to create an authority structure with power to deal with the recalcitrant and the obstructive in its midst. I have no reason for confidence that this leadership will come from the Vatican or from the leaders of the worldwide religious orders, some of which are also based in Rome.

I would add that the laity are the only possible source of reform, but except for a handful of people, the laity don’t want to think about abuse or actively blame the victims for making it public. Only pressure from the police and courts will control the corruption.

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Over at Mark Shea, there is a heated discussion of whether lying is ever not sinful. We should never deliberately commit any sin, venial or mortal.

The Catholic Catechism seems to say that all lies are sins:

By its very nature, lying is to be condemned. It is a profanation of speech, whereas the purpose of speech is to communicate known truth to others.

But is that the ONLY purpose of speech? Is it an intrinsic part of all speech? Cardinal Schönborn wrote the catechism; he is a Dominican and a Thomist, and he certainly presents Aquinas’s position here.

But is that really the only purpose of speech? If you tell an ugly and deformed person, “You are very beautiful,” in Aquinas’s view would be sinful and should never be done, even if the purpose were to dissuade the poor person not to commit suicide in despair.

I suspect that Aquinas had Asperger’s Syndrome, and his view of the purpose of speech is that which Aspergers and autistic people have.

Speech had many purposes, and “communicating known truth” is only one of them, and is not an intrinsic part of every statement.

The Greek Fathers had a very lax attitude to lying, which led to a lot of Anglo-Saxon sniffing by their English translators. God deceived Satan into killing Christ, according to one school of theology.

BTW, the bishops and the Vatican certainly do not follow the Catechism. They lie frequently, copiously, and by habit.

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John Allen wrote about the papal election: “No matter what happens, the church almost certainly won’t reverse its bans [my emphasis] on abortion, gay marriage or women priests.”

Ralph McInerney, who should have known better, also referred to the Church’s “ban” on contraception.

The use of the words “ban” or “prohibition” are profoundly misleading, since these words refer to an act of the will.

However, the magisterium of the Church is not an act of the will, but of the intellect. It is matter of judgment. That is, the Church through its various organs, councils, synods, popes, and theologians, makes a judgment about a matter of the moral law. This judgment is guided by the Holy Spirit into a gradual attaining of the truth. At certain points the judgment becomes infallible – that point is sometimes a matter of debate.

The Church has not “banned” contraception or abortion; it has made a judgment that these actions are intrinsically wrong and contrary to the structure of reality that God has created.

Similarly, although it is matter of the sacramental order rather than the moral law, the Church has decided that only bread made from wheat (not rice) and only wine made from grapes (not cherries) can be made into the Body and Blood of Christ at Mass. Any attempt to use other materials would not work, as it is contrary to the sacramental structure. In the same way only a male can be ordained a priest; a woman cannot be ordained a priest; any attempt to ordain a woman would not work. Nor, for example, can a person be baptized with rose petals, as some liberal Protestant churches occasionally do.

This does not say that rice is inferior to wheat, or cherries to grapes, or women to men, but that in the structure of sacramental reality only certain things are possible. It is a matter judgment about the structure of sacramental reality.

Of course some people disagree with the judgment, and we must weigh the relative authority of those making the judgment.

Underlying the use of words like “ban” is a voluntarist conception if law– that the Church or the Pope makes the moral law, and can change or dispense from it. An over-emphasis on obedience, or rather on what the Jesuits all “corpse obedience” as opposed to Dominican “rational obedience” contributes to this misunderstanding.

Catholic progressives often criticize “creeping infallibility” and discount the authority of Church’s ordinary magisterium when it comes to sexual morality. Galileo is often cited. This approach has been used for other purposes.

The Italian fascist official Robert Farinacci went to the Nuremberg rally in 1938.

Emma Fattorini in Hitler, Mussolini, and the Vatican, writes that

Farinacci on that occasion countered the pope’s attack on the recent fascist racial manifesto by invoking the pope’s non-infallibility regarding scientific and terrestrial topics; just as the Church had erred in the case of Galileo, so it was mistaken regarding racial theory.

The German Jesuit eugenicist Hermann Muckermann took a similar approach when Pius XI condemned eugenics in Casti Connubii. Muckermann thought that the pope had no competence in scientific matters, and the Vatican would eventually realize that eugenics was scientific and valid.

My point: it is dangerous to dismiss constant Church teachings when one is influenced by contemporary attitudes that, in retrospect, are deeply pernicious. The incidents cited above should be a caution to those who dismiss every non-infallible teaching as essentially having no authority.

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Breivik saw a threat to European civilization and decided to commit a crime to call attention to the danger to Europe and thereby to avert an even greater evil. That is, he killed 80 people so that a whole civilization might be saved. He was a practical exponent of proportionalist consequentialism. He ignored the moral absolute: you shall not murder.

Similarly the Unabomber and eco-terrorists were so certain that our way of life threatens the planet that they committed crimes to call attention to the danger we are facing. It looks like Ivins saw that the U.S. could be devastated by bioterrorism, and conducted the anthrax attacks to call attention to the danger that Congress was neglecting.

We too often think we understand history, and do wrong so that good may come of it.

But is Edward Abbey responsible for ecoterrorism? Should we not talk about dangers to the environment for fear that it might inspire ecoterrorism? Should we not consider what effect the combination of the demographic winter and Moslem immigration will have on Europe for fear it might inspire people like Breivik?

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In researching my new book, I have come across the extraordinary animus that the clergy of all denominations bore against dancing, an animus that becomes choreophobia. The Curé of Ars not only tried to stop dancing, he told one penitent that she was forbidden to watch dancing, because she would be “dancing in her heart.”

One suspects a certain control issue to which the clergy are liable. The Spectator (in 1888!) observed that a mayor of a small town planned to give a ball. The local Evangelical rector the Rev. Mr .Price was not amused, in fact, he

is exceedingly indignant and being indignant cries aloud. He tells the Mayor publicly in a letter to a local paper that balls are bad, that they inflame the worst passion of the street, that there is no Scriptural precedent for such an entertainment, that you never heard of Moses or the Prophets or Christ or the Apostles giving a ball, that God and the Bible are against balls, and that in short the Mayor who was recently ill, and might therefore have known better, is a dreadful backslider and deserves and shall receive the prayers of Mr Price and his congregation.

The populace are excited:

the common folk of Lowestoft who find life a little monotonous and thought their Mayor very kind have been so irritated that they got up a demonstration and burned the poor Rector in effigy.

The Spectator suspected that the Evangelical clergy suffered form we call today control issues:

Power is dear to the souls of all men and especially to those who may not make money and are bound by a strict rule of life and as referees upon all social questions the clergy were for a time very powerful It was at one time scarcely possible, in many circles, to read a book without clerical permission first had and obtained, while in one town at least the sorrowing maidens had to surrender their curls or pass under the ban. The motive of that order must have been the love of power, for no possible misdirection of thought can make curls immodest, and the clergy never urge, being themselves all married, that it was the duty of women to make themselves unattractive.

These clergy were strict Sabbatarians:

They insisted on three attendances at church. They prohibited all perusal of secular literature. They pronounced all amusements recreations or gatherings positively immoral, and finally they stopped – we know this will be denied but it is true – all strolling in fields. The result was that the Sunday became a day endless ennui, varied by gossiping indoors; that a dislike of it grew up in the young men; and that of all belong to that generation, the elderly men who were trained by Evangelical clergy have the least liking for attending church.

The Spectator (wrongly) though Papists did not suffer from this attitude. The Evangelical clergy’s

radical mistake – a mistake made by almost all priests except the Roman Catholic, who are kept from it by knowledge acquired in the Confessional – was that they relied on a minute regulation of conduct for the improvement of character.

Protestants, who claimed Gospel freedom, fell into the same trap that Catholics frequently fall into, trying to better men by a minute web of laws and regulations, in an attempt to protect against the slightest temptation, while forgetting that character grows only under testing.

German Catholics have long manifested a discontent with clerical celibacy. One of Luther’s first acts was to abolish clerical celibacy; Germans currently criticize Zwangszölibat, compulsory celibacy, forced celibacy. As Cardinal Brandmüller points out, the term Zwangszölibat misrepresents the discipline; no one is forced to be celibate.

Now a third of German theologians have come out asking for an end to clerical celibacy (and also demanding women priests and the acceptance of gay couples and divorced and remarried couples while we’re at it).

The appeal, published in newspaper Sueddeutsche Zeitung’s Friday edition, called on the church’s leadership to stop excluding gay couples and remarried Christians.

“The Church also needs married priests and women holding positions in the clergy,” the appeal said—in clear defiance of the Vatican’s dogmas.

In Germany theologians need the Vatican’s approval to hold chairs of Catholic theology, so this situatSupim cleibacy is going to disappear,a nd oyu can marry me, or…ion is ripe for conflict.

Josef Ratzinger himself at one time had asked for a discussion of the possibility of married priests.

The background of this conflict is the tension between German (and other national) Catholicisms and ultramontane Catholicism espoused by the Vatican, and behind that at least in part are conflicting images of masculinity: the one that sees sexual expression as an almost universal, necessary, and good aspect of masculinity and the other that sees celibacy as an expression of masculine self-discipline.

During the Kulturkampf in German (c. 1875) the Catholic Church was attacked as feminized and perverse. This accusation stung Catholic men, and a reform group in Munich, the Krausgesellschaft, arose which tried to show that masculinity and Catholicism were compatible.

One of the aims of this group was the end of clerical celibacy, because it kept young men with healthy drives out of the priesthood and let in perverse types such as were exposed in a series of scandals around 1900 – scandals which turned out to be baseless. Furthermore, celibacy kept these healthy young German men from reproducing, and degenerate types, many of these Catholic reformers went on to say, were reproducing, and they should be sterilized. And German priests should produce German children because the Aryan race was the purest and most important race and the Jews were polluting it and… I think you can see where this ended up.

Historians have been puzzled why Nazism arose in Munich; later of course the conflict between Nazism and the Catholic Church was bitter, but at the beginning Catholic reformers – and remember, these were reformers – were espousing naturalist and racial theories in Munich. The young Heinrich Himmler was a pious Catholic university student in Munich.

This is not to say that the current crop of German reformers are racialists or Nazis, but the Vatican has a long memory, and suspects with justice that demands for a change in the discipline of clerical celibacy often lead to demands for radical changes in Christian doctrine. The theologians who coupleda demand for the end to clerical celibacy with a demand for the acceptance of homosexual couples have simply strengthened the Vatican’s determination not to make any major changes in the discipline of celibacy at this time.

(The information about the Krausgesellschaft comes from Derek Hastings’ article “Fears of a Feminized Church: Catholicism, Clerical Celibacy, and the Crisis of Masculinity in Wilhelmine Germany.”)

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Pope John Paul did not want criminal abuser priests reported to the police.

He will be canonized and 99.99% of the laity will applaud.

No one wants anyone to be accountable – for fear they THEY might be held accountable.

John Allen interviewed Cardinal George, who tip-toed around the delicate issue of whether bishops should ever be held accountable for their failures – basically, George thought, no.

George did admit that bishops had failed to punish abusive priests, and that they should use their authority of governance to act against such people.

Many of laity heartily disagree: Here are some of the reactions (and remember, George is speaking of the failure of bishops to punish priests who molested children):

I am concerned that Cardinal George is talking about governing – Jesus promised servants and persons who lead by example – the use of the term govern indicates that the bishops have forgotten that they are servants first – I also am not sure about the reluctance to punish – servants don’t punish – shepherds don’t punish they guide and they teach – rulers punish – Cardinal George nor any bishop is a ruler.

The Cardinal says that bishops need to “take possession of their vocation” by being “governors… who exercise the power to punish.”Spoken like the Grand Inquisitor. Christ exercised his power in the form of a servant. His authority was “self-emptying.”The faithful have already seen far too much of the “power to punich” emmanating from today’s bishops. This is not Vatican II thinking. It smacks of the trumphalism of another age.Sorry. But that’s not what people look for in their supposed shepherd.possession of their vocation,” not just as teachers and preachers, but as governors who exercise, however reluctantly, “the power to punish.”

Perhaps Cardinal George does not know that many Catholics are not interested in the hierarchy’s power to punish, simply b/c they do not recognize it. We are Catholics regardless of what bishops think or proclaim.

This would be a grave mistake. The truth is that bishops no longer effectively have that kind of power and Catholics no longer will accept the role of ‘child’ and cede the role of ‘parent’ to the bishop. Those days are behind us for good.

Is it revealing — or merely an accident — that nowhere in this article, which spends so much time looking at the role of the bishops, does the word “pastoral” appear? “Punish,” on the other hand, is right there.

Where does Cardinal George find a mandate for bishops to be “governors who exercise … the power to punish?” Certainly not in Christ’s command to His Apostles at the Last Supper: “I have given you a model to follow, so that as I have done for you, you should also do. … no slave is greater than his master nor any messenger greater than him who sent him.” (John 13:35-36). Nor is it in Paul’s description of what Christ did: “He emptied himself, taking the form of a slave coming in human likeness, and found human in appearance, he humbled himself, becoming obedient to death, even death on a cross.” (Phil.2:5-8).
The true definition of the bishop’s role in the Church is service and leadership (like the “good shepherd” who leads out his flock), a role certainly absent in many recent highly publicised statements and actions by bishops, not only in America. In spite of Cardinal George’s opinion to the contrary, most Catholics seek clear moral principles on which to base their decisions not moral micromanaging by the hierarchy.
The Church of Christ calls for pastoral leadership, not juridical and punitive authority.

“The power to punish!” WHAT? Are we children? George may be the intellectual leader of the Bishops but he’s an idiot.

In the current climate, I’d be very cautious about touting the “power to punish.” Lay people can ignore bishops, celebrate the sacraments as they please, and there is no policing body available to enforce. Cardinal George would find episcopal credibility eroding even further. He shouldn’t dismiss the power to persuade very easily. It sure worked for Jesus.

So the good cardinal says that “bishops are more prepared to ‘take possession of their vocation’, not just as teachers and preachers, but as governors who exercise, however reluctantly, ‘the power to punish’.”Well, lordy-lordy, why am I not surprised by this guy’s remarks???Of course our “JPII” bishops are “more prepared” to “take possession [of] the power to punish”. They stand on their episcopal pedestals, by God, and we’re all gonna’ risk our eternal salvation if we tell these fellas they’re full of it!!!

One might point out the story of Annas and Sapphira in Acts, or Paul’s instruction to deliver a sinning brother over to Satan. Obviously punishment is to be used only in extreme cases, for the good of the sinner and the good of the Church – but the attitude that punishment is NEVER to be used, that bishops should only persuade and never punish, is what allowed sexual abuse to flourish in the Church.

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In his Christmas message to the curia, Pope Benedict lamented sexual abuse and said the church must reflect on what went wrong. He, as a theologian, thought that distorted moral theology in the 1960s and 1970s contributed to the abuse.

In order to resist these forces, we must turn our attention to their ideological foundations. In the 1970s, paedophilia was theorized as something fully in conformity with man and even with children. This, however, was part of a fundamental perversion of the concept of ethos. It was maintained – even within the realm of Catholic theology – that there is no such thing as evil in itself or good in itself. There is only a “better than” and a “worse than”. Nothing is good or bad in itself. Everything depends on the circumstances and on the end in view. Anything can be good or also bad, depending upon purposes and circumstances. Morality is replaced by a calculus of consequences, and in the process it ceases to exist. The effects of such theories are evident today.

Among specialists, however, there are serious reservations as to whether proportionalism really is to blame.

First, moral theologians say that proportionalism reached its high-water mark in the 1970s and has been in retreat ever since. Focusing on it now, they say, risks fighting yesterday’s battles.

Second, Redemptorist moral theologian Fr. Brian Johnstone of the Catholic University of America said in the wake of the pope’s 2008 remarks that he’s not aware of any serious Catholic moralist who ever invoked the theory to justify the sexual exploitation of minors.

Johnstone, an Australian who over the years has been critical of proportionalism, said he’s “totally unconvinced” of any connection between proportionalism and the abuse crisis.

Third, statistical studies of the crisis may not support a link to a defective moral theory.

Margaret Smith, data analyst for a John Jay study of the “causes and context” of the sexual abuse crisis commissioned by the U.S. bishops, likewise said in 2008 that research found incidents of sexual abuse as far back as 1950, the very beginning of the time frame the bishops asked them to consider (1950-2000). Those earlier acts of abuse probably cannot be explained by proportionalism.

Smith added that changing attitudes towards authority in the ’60s and ’70s, as well as a growing individualism in the broader culture, may well have played a role in the crisis – and that, she said, was perhaps the point Benedict “was reaching for” in 2008. Nonetheless, Smith said, her hunch is that when all the data is in, proportionalism will not loom large.

“This is behavior much more deeply embedded in the personality of individuals than a particular theory of moral action,” Smith said. “I think the analysis of causes will have more to do with things like preparation for living a life of celibate chastity, and how to understand and deal with intimacy.”

While the specific theory of proportionalism may not have been the main culprit, there were plenty of influential theologians around who contributed the climate of sexual laxity, especially about homosexual behavior.

The reports of true pedophilia (small children, under 10 or so) were a small portion of the abuse committed by priests and in fact declined slowly after 1950.

Terrible abuse has long occurred in the Church, but at least in the US there is a big spike in the reports of abuse of boys 12-18, abuse that occurred in the 1960s and 1970. Abusers showed older boys books by theologians who said that homosexual sex could be ok.

The Rev Anthony Kosnick in the Catholic Theological Society of America book, Human Sexuality: New Direction in American Catholic Thought (1977) concluded that

“at this time the behavioral sciences have not identified any sexual expression that can be empirically demonstrated to be of itself, in a culture-free way, detrimental to full human existence.”

Any sexual expression – any.

Of course society is not as enlightened as Catholic theologians, and it criminalizes certain behaviors, so Kosnick advised that until society realizes that there is no sexual expression that is in itself harmful,

“enlightened and well-integrated individuals might well free themselves of conflict by simply reflecting on the relativity of their society’s sexual ethic and proceed discreetly with their sexual project.”

And so several thousand Catholic priests proceeded with their sexual project.

Of course unenlightened parents would sometimes object.

Rev. Andre Guindon, who is still held up as a progressive theologian, had taught in The Sexual Language, abook that the abuser Rudy Kos used in his seminary, that

“the most recent studies tend to disprove that lasting hurt comes from pedophiliac contact itself. Rather, the trauma comes from the familial panic which is the usual response to the incident.”

The children are hurt not by sexual contacts with priests, but by parents who make a fuss about it – so taught a leading theologian, and such seemed to be the attitude of the bishops.

Danneels was generally seen as one of the last of the Vatican II generation who knew that council intimately and supported its reforms. He would be, for lack of a better term, a liberal by many of today’s ecclesiastical measures. But it doesn’t matter. So was Archbishop Rembert Weakland, and his handling of some abuse cases was notoriously callous, and in his own attempt to hide a homosexual liaison he saw fit to lift nearly a half million dollars from archdiocesan coffers without telling anyone.

By contrast, Cardinal Anthony Bevelacqua of Philadelphia was a noted conservative, one of those who could be described as leading the reversal on Vatican II reforms. The Philadelphia Grand Jury report on his role in hiding sexual predators and using the law to avoid accountability is deeply disturbing reading. So are the documents in which Cardinals Bernard Law and Edward Egan are depicted overseeing the handling of abuse cases in their respective dioceses. Both are staunch conservatives and would be considered by many as protectors of a traditionalist approach to ecclesiology and church teaching.

Wherever members of the hierarchy are on the political, theological or ecclesiological spectrums, they meet first as brothers in a unique culture of celibate men who have sworn oaths of allegiance to the papacy and who have repeatedly acted to protect the institution while shunning the plight of thousands of child victims of abusive priests.

“I came to think that the problem was in some way cultural,” wrote Australian Bishop Mark Coleridge of the sex abuse crisis. “But that prompted the further question of how; what was it that allowed this canker to grow in the body of the Catholic church, not just here and there but more broadly?”

Coleridge does not provide a magic answer in that pastoral letter prepared last spring for Pentecost. However, he raises a number of issues – inadequat seminary training, the church’s “culture of discretion,” seminary training that creates “a kind of institutional immaturity, “a certain church triumphalism,” and the church’s tendence to see things in the light of sin and forgiveness rather than crime and punishment – that deserve far wider discussion and examination.

He includes in that list “clericalism understood as a hierarchy of power, not service.” It is one of many influences that caused so many in the hierarchy to confront the abuse crisis in ways they now say they regret. Perhaps it ought to be at the top of the list. Danneels is merely the latest sorry example, though a current one, demonstrating that for so long the actions of many of the community’s leaders were drastically out of step with what they were preaching.

Roberts identifies clericalism as the attitude that caused bishops to protect abusers. Even more disturbing, and Benedict has touched on this in his remarks on repentance, is a distortion in Catholic attitudes and teaching on sin, repentance, punishment, and expiation. Unconditional forgiveness is preached: God forgives unconditionally, we are repeatedly told (without our repentance?) and therefore victims must unconditionally forgive their abuser and oppressors, even if the abusers and oppressors remain unrepentant and unpunished. There is something seriously wrong with this, as the first word of the message of the Gospel is “Repent,” but it needs someone more learned in doctrine and history than I am to sort out what went wrong.

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When I researching the book on clerical murders that I have underway, I noticed that even secular newspapers from 1900 -1920 used the words expiation in regard to punishment, especially capital punishment. Now the word expiation appears only in crossword puzzles.

According to the chairman of the Catholic bishops’ conference of Germany, the death of Jesus Christ was not a redemptive act of God to liberate human beings from the bondage of sin and open the gates of heaven. The Archbishop of Freiburg, Robert Zollitsch, known for his liberal views, publicly denied the fundamental Christian dogma of the sacrificial nature of Christ’s death in a recent interview with a German television station.

Zollitsch said that Christ “did not die for the sins of the people as if God had provided a sacrificial offering, like a scapegoat.”

Instead, Jesus had offered only “solidarity” with the poor and suffering. Zollitsch said “that is this great perspective, this tremendous solidarity.”

The interviewer asked, “You would now no longer describe it in such a way that God gave his own son, because we humans were so sinful? You would no longer describe it like this?”

Monsignor Zollitsch responded, “No.”

The loss of the sense of expiation may help explain why the hierarchy treated abusers so lightly: expiatory punishment is a forgotten concept.

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The Greek philosophers in general and Christian thinkers after them have seen the emotions (passions) as innate parts of human nature. Even the Stoics, who seem to condemn the passions, really only condemn disorderly, irrational passions, as Aquinas and others have noted.

John Chrysostom cautions against anger, but he implicitly means disorderly anger, as he sees both anger (the irascible appetite) and desire (the concupiscible appetite) as essential, and therefore God-created, parts of human nature.

Yet surely both are naturally implanted, and both are set in us for our profit, both anger, and desire: the one that we may chastise the evil, and correct those who walk disorderly; the other, that we may have children, and that our race may be recruited by such succession. (Homily XVII on Matthew V.28.28)

Of anger Chrysostom says:

And what is the proper time for anger? When we are not avenging ourselves, but checking others in their lawless freaks, or forcing them to attend in their negligence.

And what is the unsuitable time? When we do so as avenging ourselves….(Homily XVI. Matt.V.37)

(One author met someone who said the Israelis must forgive the Palestinians for their attacks on children and turn the other cheek; but this pacifist then went on an length and vituperatively about a colleague who had failed to give the pacifist proper mention in an academic article. I think we have all encountered the type. It is easy to tolerate evils done to others.)

As someone in the comments mentioned, this analysis of the role of the passions creates a problem for the doctrine of creation: if man was created in a world without evil (and God had pronounced it “very good) and was immortal, why are these two passions clearly designed for a world beset by evil and death?

I have not yet encountered a good explanation.

Presumably, in an unfallen world the energies that we feel as anger and desire would take different forms – but the forms are unimaginable. And what will they be look in the new creation, when death and evil will be no more?

My tentative guess is that God, know that his rational creates would sin and fall, create the universe ruled by transiency (and therefore death) and created human nature such that it had these passions so that man could face with courage the evils of the world and reproduce in his warfare against death.

As the Murphy Report noted, church discipline in Ireland was almost totally neglected in Ireland. In thirty years only two canonical trials were held, and these were held in opposition to the chief canonist.

The Roman Catholic Church sometimes suffers from legalism, to which voluntarist moral theology and casuistry contributed. But law has a place in any society, as Paul explained in I Timothy: “Now we know that the law is good, if anyone uses it lawfully, understanding this, that the law is not laid down for the just but for the lawless and disobedient, for the ungodly and sinners, for the unholy and profane, for murderers of fathers and murders of mothers, for manslayers, immoral persons, sodomites, kidnapers, liars, perjurers, and whatever else is contrary to sound doctrine.” In this category defilers of children certainly belong.

Despite all the claims that bishops were only concerned with orthodoxy, there has been almost no action against either practitioners or preachers of sexual immorality such as Paul Shanley or the Catholic Theological Society, which has never disowned its infamous book Human Sexuality that advises that until society accepts the full range of sexual practices, “enlightened and well-integrated individuals might well free themselves of conflict by simply reflecting on the relativity of their society’s sexual ethic and proceed discreetly with their sexual project.” Bishops may have been personally orthodoxy, but they never did anything to assure that only Catholic morality was taught under Catholic auspices. In fact (as I know from extensive personal experience) they deeply resented anyone who pointed out the gross heresy that was being taught under Catholic auspices. Not the preachers of immorality, but the ones who asked the bishop to act against those preachers, were the objects of the bishops’ ire.

At best bishops issued documents that were quietly filed away; the bishops thought they had done their duty and let the chaos in the Church continue unchecked. Only annoying the bishop would provoke his wrath; raping children did not concern him. The children and parents who begged for justice were the ones the bishops disliked – they inconvenienced the bishop, and there was no greater sin in the bishop’s mind than to inconvenience a bishop. This was as true in Ireland as in the United States.